Sonia McLoughlin, what is she doing working as an interviewer for the BBC's Six Nations team?

She is terrible; banal, obvious and insight-free. It is also becoming quite clear that there is little love lost between her and Martin Johnson.

We suspect that Johnno, in his typical, no nonsense, "what the blazes would you know about it?" style, is rather unreconstructed when it comes to being interviewed about rugby by a woman. And good on him for it. Everyone knows she's only there to promote "diversity" and appeal to a "wider audience".

Desert superstition adherents among our loyal and diverse readership will be delighted to learn that His Holiness the Pope™ (brought to you in association with Whirlpool, emancipators of the distaff side since 1906) has hit the headlines again. Read more...

But here's the kicker, the treacherous stiletto between the Papal shoulder blades. Apparently the Bishops of England and Wales have issued a statement that, according to Damian Thompson (who strikes us a quite a nice bloke on the whole, if a little batty), leaves out the bits of His Holiness' missive that they don't like.

To be honest, we wouldn't know either way, but what staggers us is the sheer effort and intellectual rigour that many of the Holy Smoke bloggers put into their arguments.

Why not Harry Potter. Why not The Clangers?

As a certain Oxford professor (who is surely destined for eternal damnation) once said....

We who doubt that “theology” is a subject at all, or who compare it with the study of leprechauns, are eagerly hoping to be proved wrong. Of course, university departments of theology house many excellent scholars of history, linguistics, literature, ecclesiastical art and music, archaeology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, iconology, and other worthwhile and important subjects. These academics would be welcomed into appropriate departments elsewhere in the university. But as for theology itself, defined as “the organised body of knowledge dealing with the nature, attributes, and governance of God”, a positive case now needs to be made that it has any real content at all, and that it has any place in today’s universities.

None of the countries highlighted in the report are exactly renowned for their tolerance of opposition or their commitment to the free flow of ideas, so its contents will come as no surprise to anyone. Read more...

However, the report still makes sobering reading for those of us fortunate enough to live in a free society who take unregulated access to the internet for granted.

6th June, 1944; British and Commonwealth troops land on Gold, Juno and Sword beaches in Normandy, and so begins the final chapter in the struggle to rid Europe of a monstrous experiment in homogenising its peoples.

6th June, 1975; opposition leader, Edward Heath, flanked by Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, welcomes the "yes" vote on Britain's continued membership of the European Economic Community, knowing, but not telling us, that the long-term objective was to transform Europe from a federation of independent sovereign nations into a federal state, one in which state power no longer derives from a popular mandate.

4th June, 2009; Britain has a chance, possibly a last chance, to end this constitutional fraud, this centralisation in Brussels of economic and foreign policy, defence, police, justice and executive, without accountability to the electorate, this lemming-like descent into oligarchical dictatorship, the Lisbon Treaty.

quite categorically ‘pro-European’. But it wants ‘radical reform of its institutions to make them more democratic and accountable’.

....and which appears, finally, to have jolted the Conservatives out of their Euro-torpor, to the extent that yesterday William Hague and Mark Francois travelled to Brussels and informed European People's Party chairman and MEP, Joseph Daul, of the Tories' intention to leave the federalist group before the European elections (no mention of this in the news section of the EPP's own website, but a click on Britain on the map at the top of their member parties page delivers the following telling message, "no member parties").

So, is a vote for the Conservatives on 4th June a vote for the referendum on the Lisbon Treaty European Constitution? Will Cameron make good his leadership campaign promise?

Whisper it, but it's looking a little more hopeful today. The future looks just that little bit brighter. But don't hang out the bunting just yet. Check the front pages of today's papers for a report on this. You'll need a microscope.

Still, something to cheer us up after what has been a pretty miserable few months news wise.

If Cameron really is as good as his word and we get the referendum the country needs and desires, what price a return to the Tory fold of the splendid, redoubtable Nigel Farage, as, without a backward glance, he leaves UKIP and its hatstand fringe behind him? Well, we can hope, can't we?

To emphasise the importance of 4th June, and to remind David Cameron that, at least today, he is answerable to us and not to Brussels (and that we have the nuclear option of UKIP or Libertas up our sleeves), we leave you with this excerpt from an article written last year by Helga Zepp-LaRouche....

Lest anyone remain doubtful about what this Lisbon Treaty means—an oligarchical dictatorship, in which member-states' sovereignty has been wholly relinquished in favor of an aggressive, imperial structure, one in which a new feudalism leaves no remaining handles for defending the social welfare state and the general welfare, and which would lead us further down the road to a suicidal confrontation with Russia and China, as demonstrated most recently by the EU's behavior in the case of Kosovo—then let him take to heart the words of the treaty's author, Giuliano Amato, who is currently Italy's Interior Minister.

In an interview with La Stampa on July 12, 2000, Amato elaborated on how his model is England and the Middle Ages: "Therefore I prefer to go slowly, to crumble little by little pieces of sovereignty, avoiding sudden shifts from national to federal powers.... And why not going back to the period before Hobbes? The Middle Ages had a much richer humanity, and a diversity of identity which today can be a model. The Middle Ages is beautiful; it can have policymaking centers, without entirely relying on anyone. It is beyond the bounds of the nation-state. Today, as then, nomads are reappearing in our societies. Today also, we have powers without territories. Without sovereignties....Democracy does not need a sovereign."

The monstrous regiment of spare ribbers has taken over at Labour List, where we're overjoyed to report that Leila Deen has taken up an invitation to put her side of the green slime story. Read more...

Little to be gained, really, by examining the meat of the piece, which can best be described as a few paragraphs of envious spartist sloganising with a dash of Militant Gay Whales Against Trident lesbianism for that extra bitter flavour.

There is one thing, however, on which we feel we cannot stand idly by.

Leila describes herself variously as....

....dare I say attractive....

and....

....a smartly dressed woman....

Sorry, love, you may well dare say it, but in actual fact you've got a face only a mother could love and the dress sense of a five-day-old greengrocer's display.

I believe the BNP is a racist party, and therefore I don't support them. They're getting more support now because the mainstream parties have consistently ignored people's legitimate concerns about multiculturalism, and many people feel they've been left with no choice but to vote for them. If politicians listened to what people actually want, the BNP would be nothing.

Quite, and while Geert Wilders gets unceremoniously bundled back across the North Sea, Ibrahim Moussawi is given a free pass to spew his hate speech wherever he wishes.

Does Jacqui Smith want to drive people into the warm embrace of the BNP?

....which we hope may, in the fullness of time, become a big one. Read more...

It seems that disillusionment with the mainstream political parties' (apart from certain worthy individuals - stand up, Messrs. Benn, Davis, Green etc.) refusal to address the steady erosion of fundamental liberties that has characterised the last 11 years of Labour rule, has reached such a pitch that hardly a day goes by without the announcement of a new political party or group, calling for an end to curruption and authoritarianism in public life.

Excellent. Any action, be it a new political party or a barrage of indignant correspondence to candidates, that keeps the major parties honest in respect of civil liberties is to be welcomed. However, we wonder if such a proliferation of candidates from minor parties doesn't rather defeat the object of the exercise, namely to loosen the big three's grip on the democratic process and force a rethink on their approach to liberty, by diluting the protest vote.

Be that as it may, it's at least heartening to know that there is a growing nationwide animus towards the political inertia and disrespect for Parliament that has allowed such a raft of mean spirited, politically driven legislation that criminalises thousands of ordinary, decent people.

Pretty dim witted stuff really. In the unlikely event that this woman is any kind of success in her life she won’t recall this incident with any pride. If she doesn't amount to anything, well that just goes to show what sort of witless twonk goes around egging ministers. Read more...

Loathsome individual though he is, we’d have applauded Mandy if he’d given the daft bint a gay slap.

Though we would not, of course, have “stood behind” him or “backed him to the hilt”, as we're sure you’ll appreciate.

Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson, England's greatest naval hero, had four orders of knighthood conferred upon him and commanded the 100 gun ship of the line, HMS Victory at the Battle of Trafalgar. He died there. Read more...

Sir Teddy the Soak, now Ireland's greatest naval hero, attempted to drive the 8 cylinder submersible, USS Oldsmobile under the Bridge of Chappaquiddick. He ran away.

“This notion that somehow there is any lessening of that special relationship is misguided,” Mr. Obama said, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office. “Rest assured that the relationship is not only special and strong, but will only get stronger as time goes on.”

Now we would put nothing past this devious and mendacious Government of all the Invertebrates, least of all the leaking of a scare story which they know will whip the conspiracy theorists into a frenzy, in order to draw attention away from the growing cross-party consensus for restoration of our stolen freedoms, exemplified by Saturday's Convention on Modern Liberty.

However, as we said in another place earlier today, if there is a grain of truth to this horrifying revelation, soldiers from General Sir David Richards to the lowliest private, would do well to remember where their allegiances lie, that their oath is to Her Majesty the Queen and not to any elected government.

Well, it was Iain Martin actually but he got the free plug so he can button his lip.

Boris' acid quill is really on form here....

She is meant to be Labour's deputy leader. She is a solicitor, and an alumna of Hammersmith's highly regarded, fee-paying St Paul's School for Girls, and she can sometimes be perfectly pleasant and rational. But here is a sample of Harman's ravings on the subject of Sir Fred and his pension: "He should not be counting on being £650,000 a year better off as a result of this, because it's not going to happen," she told the BBC. "It will not be accepted."

There. Savour the bleating leftie inanity of that sentiment: it will not be accepted. By whom will it not be accepted, Hattie, and how will it not be accepted? Since she agrees – in the same breath – that the details of Sir Fred's severance from the Royal Bank of Scotland may, in fact, be watertight, her highly trained legal mind must envisage some change in the law.

Does she really imagine that parliamentary draftsmen should be now at work on the Fred Goodwin Pension Reclamation Bill? In which case, exactly how much of Sir Fred's pension does she think should be recouped? All of it? Or just 95 per cent of it? And what about all the other cock-up artists who used to be in charge of the Royal Bank, and what about the people who made a hash of Northern Rock, and all the bankers who have been kicked out of institutions in which the state has been obliged to take a share?

Will their assets be expropriated under the same Act? How will their guilt be determined, or will Hattie just put on her leopardskin accessories and stomp and jingle through the City, waving her calabash rattle and sniffing out the culprits?Sir Fred's settlement is nauseating; it is unbelievable. But it will be accepted, and it must be accepted, because it already has been accepted – by Harriet Harman's ministerial colleague.

CIF has a clip of former Master of the Rolls and Lord Chief Justice, Lord Bingham of Cornhill's speech to the Convention on Modern Liberty. Read more...

We commend it to you, dear reader....

The Commons should be a bastion and defender of our freedoms, not an accomplice in their unjustified erosion.

Hear hear.

What makes us hopeful that the COML will be more than just an irrelevant talking shop is the fact that it has attracted support from all shades of opinion, uniting such politically diverse individuals and organisations as the Countryside Alliance, Tony Benn and David Davis in this grand endeavour to restore our treasured personal liberty.

When the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom (of which Lord Bingham is a key architect) sits for the first time later this year, its first task must surely be to rule on the constitutionality of the raft of malignant, politically inspired security legislation that has marked this government's time in office, and remove its crushing weight from our shoulders for ever.

Such a shame that the Noble Lord will not be the Court's first president.

A tug of the forelock to Bloggers4UKIP for drawing our attention to this Philip Pullman piece, which was originally published on timesonline, but was, apparently, very hastily pulled. Read more...

We quote in full....

Are such things done on Albion’s shore?

The image of this nation that haunts me most powerfully is that of the sleeping giant Albion in William Blake’s prophetic books. Sleep, profound and inveterate slumber: that is the condition of Britain today.

We do not know what is happening to us. In the world outside, great events take place, great figures move and act, great matters unfold, and this nation of Albion murmurs and stirs while malevolent voices whisper in the darkness - the voices of the new laws that are silently strangling the old freedoms the nation still dreams it enjoys.

We are so fast asleep that we don’t know who we are any more. Are we English? Scottish? Welsh? British? More than one of them? One but not another? Are we a Christian nation - after all we have an Established Church - or are we something post-Christian? Are we a secular state? Are we a multifaith state? Are we anything we can all agree on and feel proud of?

The new laws whisper:

You don’t know who you are

You’re mistaken about yourself

We know better than you do what you consist of, what labels apply to you, which facts about you are important and which are worthless

We do not believe you can be trusted to know these things, so we shall know them for you

And if we take against you, we shall remove from your possession the only proof we shall allow to be recognised

The sleeping nation dreams it has the freedom to speak its mind. It fantasises about making tyrants cringe with the bluff bold vigour of its ancient right to express its opinions in the street. This is what the new laws say about that:

Expressing an opinion is a dangerous activity

Whatever your opinions are, we don’t want to hear them

So if you threaten us or our friends with your opinions we shall treat you like the rabble you are

And we do not want to hear you arguing about it

So hold your tongue and forget about protesting

What we want from you is acquiescence

The nation dreams it is a democratic state where the laws were made by freely elected representatives who were answerable to the people. It used to be such a nation once, it dreams, so it must be that nation still. It is a sweet dream.

You are not to be trusted with laws

So we shall put ourselves out of your reach

We shall put ourselves beyond your amendment or abolition

You do not need to argue about any changes we make, or to debate them, or to send your representatives to vote against them

You do not need to hold us to account

You think you will get what you want from an inquiry?

Who do you think you are?

What sort of fools do you think we are?

The nation’s dreams are troubled, sometimes; dim rumours reach our sleeping ears, rumours that all is not well in the administration of justice; but an ancient spell murmurs through our somnolence, and we remember that the courts are bound to seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and we turn over and sleep soundly again.

And the new laws whisper:

We do not want to hear you talking about truth

Truth is a friend of yours, not a friend of ours

We have a better friend called hearsay, who is a witness we can always rely on

We do not want to hear you talking about innocence

Innocent means guilty of things not yet done

We do not want to hear you talking about the right to silence

You need to be told what silence means: it means guilt

We do not want to hear you talking about justice

Justice is whatever we want to do to you

And nothing else

Are we conscious of being watched, as we sleep? Are we aware of an ever-open eye at the corner of every street, of a watching presence in the very keyboards we type our messages on? The new laws don’t mind if we are. They don’t think we care about it.

We want to watch you day and night

We think you are abject enough to feel safe when we watch you

We can see you have lost all sense of what is proper to a free people

We can see you have abandoned modesty

Some of our friends have seen to that

They have arranged for you to find modesty contemptible

In a thousand ways they have led you to think that whoever does not want to be watched must have something shameful to hide

We want you to feel that solitude is frightening and unnatural

We want you to feel that being watched is the natural state of things

One of the pleasant fantasies that consoles us in our sleep is that we are a sovereign nation, and safe within our borders. This is what the new laws say about that:

We know who our friends are

And when our friends want to have words with one of you

We shall make it easy for them to take you away to a country where you will learn that you have more fingernails than you need

It will be no use bleating that you know of no offence you have committed under British law

It is for us to know what your offence is

Angering our friends is an offence

It is inconceivable to me that a waking nation in the full consciousness of its freedom would have allowed its government to pass such laws as the Protection from Harassment Act (1997), the Crime and Disorder Act (1998), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000), the Terrorism Act (2000), the Criminal Justice and Police Act (2001), the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (2001), the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Extension Act (2002), the Criminal Justice Act (2003), the Extradition Act (2003), the Anti-Social Behaviour Act (2003), the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act (2004), the Civil Contingencies Act (2004), the Prevention of Terrorism Act (2005), the Inquiries Act (2005), the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (2005), not to mention a host of pending legislation such as the Identity Cards Bill, the Coroners and Justice Bill, and the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

As if they had nothing better to do with a shade over 1300 days before the next presidential election, Harris conducted an interactive poll last week, in which Americans were asked who they admired enough to call a hero. Read more...

Topping the survey of 2,634 people, whose grasp of history must rank alongside David Irving's, was the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama. The Lamb of God, who has clung tenaciously to the top spot since the first such poll in 2001, in the face of fierce competition from the likes of Magic Johnson and Elvis Presley, had to be content with second place. When contacted by The Slinger, The Redeemer's PR people were not available for comment.

That shock result in full (if you can bear to look)....

We'll be keeping a weather eye on this Obama fellow, because the day he actually does something heroic, the sense of universal beatitude will be something to savour.

According to a poll conducted last week by CNN, everyone's favourite average small town Alaska hockey mom and Washington outsider (it says here) has nudged into the lead for....wait for it....the 2012 GOP nomination, with Mitt Romney hot on her heels and Some Other Candidate leaving a pre-meltdown Bobby Jindal carrying the wooden spoon. With a mere 1100-odd days remaining until the primary, this could prove to be a real nail biter.

But wait! What's this?

"So many things will happen between now and 2012 that this poll has no real predictive value," says (CNN Polling Director) Keating Holland.

So what can we glean from this startling revelation (no pun intended), apart from nothing of any political value?

We guess it's that even in these times of tightened belts and "Buddy, can you spare a mortgage bailout?", it's comforting to know that there's one demographic group that will never go short, those latter-day Isaiahs, the pollsters.

Curious Snippets, among a host of others, returns to the Geert Wilders controversy following Lord Ahmed of Rotherham's motorway texting death crash trial. Read more...

Tush and fie, gentlemen! This man does not deserve our opprobrium. He deserves our pity. He is clearly in dire need of immediate clinical intervention.

He is after all the man who, in condemning Salman Rushdie's knighthood, compared the writer to a holocaust denier, and in the very same breath, without a trace of irony, referred to the "alleged Armenian genocide".

The evidence....

The possibility should at least be examined that long-term committal to a home for the bewildered would keep him off our roads, and our television screens, for considerably longer than a 12 week sentence for causing death by reckless driving.

I have a theory about what exactly Brown is up to with these diversionary tactics, which I'll post on later. But for now, remember the bread and circuses aspect to this 'hunt the banker' chase after Goodwin. He deserves the public anger but remember that it suits the government for attention to be diverted from as yet unspecified billions which will cripple the taxpayer towards, instead, the smaller but more easily understood £650,000 going to Fred the Shred.

Gordon Brown has form: he usually has a populist story leaked for a reason. And it's often designed to divert attention from an even bigger story.

As the flames from this story grow higher, the leaking last night of the detail that Godwin gets £650,000 a year, now, for leaving, is starting to look like the most stupid leak for many a year. Its effect may have been to obscure the detail about the bail-out, but it has now spun out of control.

So, even by this government's lofty standards, a piece of populist misdirection that, had it been performed by Derren Brown, would have drawn gasps of admiration from a dumbfounded audience. Or rather it would be, were it not for the fact that for such prestidigitation to have the desired effect, it's generally a good idea if the victim doesn't see the illusionist's fumbling hands and the cards cascading to the floor.

Surely by now everyone's onto the Prime Minister's increasingly desperate and transparent efforts to save his floundering government and his own reputation.

Back in October, during the final days of the US presidential race, The Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal editor, James Taranto, who gets it right quite often, gave us the heads up on rise of the Angry Right, a phenomenon no less unwelcome than its rabidly incontinent left wing equivalent, for all its inevitability.... Read more...

For years this column has chronicled the follies and outrages of the Angry Left. If we are now seeing the emergence of an Angry Right, that is not a good sign for either the country or those on the conservative and Republican sides of the ideological and partisan divides.

Political hatred is not only wrong, it is counterproductive. As we observed in 2005, "one reason Democrats failed to unseat President Bush was that they were blinded by their hatred for him. This made them overconfident, as they mistook their emotions for facts."

Furthermore, expressions of hatred are unattractive to those who do not share the feeling--a category that presumably includes almost all of the independent and undecided voters who will end up deciding the election. For the Obama campaign and its allies in the media, then, the Angry Right's behavior is an opportunity: a chance to make the other side--including the McCain campaign itself--look like a bunch of scary wackos.

The MSM may well have given Obama an armchair ride during the election campaign, but how many undecideds do our colleagues at Conservative Oasis expect to win over to their cause with nonsense like that?

Not to mention this foam-flecked diatribe from Alan Keyes, which went viral about 30 seconds after it was aired.

*******************************************

On a personal note, it's good to be back after a two year career-enforced hiatus, and good to see how many of the old salts that we used to follow are still putting blinkered ideologues and political chancers alike through the wringer.